The bow of the David Tucker
So with the fantastic diving that we had had on Saturday we decided that we would do another four dives on the Sunday. So we headed back to Stuart Cove’s and signed ourselves up. The Bahamas Dive Club were planning to dive Sunday morning so we joined them for the first two dives.
The first dive was at the Davy Tucker. As we were all experienced divers we didn’t have to follow the guide this meant that Brad and I dropped into the water and descended straight to the wreck. It was fantastic. We were the only divers on the wreck and we were able to get some great shots. Eventually the other divers joined us from the reef and we did our safety stop and ended the dive.
Unfortunately we had to go back to the dock to pick up two “resort” divers. Basically they had done the confined session of a DSD and were now going to do the optional open water dive. So once we had picked them up we went to Will Laurie. The Will Laurie doesn’t have one wreck but there are 4 wrecks in close vicinity, which we didn’t find out until we got there. As we were quite a big group Brad and I decided to go and explore the others before exploring the Will Laurie. We took a bearing of the buoy at the Anthony Bell and we jumped in. We made good progress and we found the Anthony Bell quite easily. Well we thought it was the Anthony Bell but as we swam around it I couldn’t see the line for the buoy. However, we had found the Royal James. No penetration possibilities but it was nice for a bimble. We decided to explore a little further to see if we could find the Anthony Bell. The wreck is well preserved. I even took a good look inside. In the engine room was a 5lb weight whichI thought about taking but I was working on trying to sort out my weight and I didn’t want to mess up my buoyancy. We were getting close to half a cylinder each so we headed back towards the Will Laurie. It has some beautiful coral structures on its roof. Beside the Will Laurie was the wreck of a Haitian refugee boat, but only its engines remained. The dive photographer (Stuart Cove’s always seems to have one) showed us where a Moray Eel was. I got a few snaps but the light level was too low. It was soon time for our safety stop and we headed back to the boat.
At Stuart Cove’s we moved our kit to the next boat and then headed to the grill to grab a couple of burgers. The burgers are currently 8$ and come with a bag of crisps (chips for all you Americans). They are actually quite good and definitely help stave off the hunger pains between dives. I recommend you grab one if you are there.
It was 1pm and time to set sail for the next set of dives. Our dive leader was Neal. Neal is the “shark whisperer”. He took us the day before on our dives to the Ray of Hope and the Shark Arena. Today he took us to Palace Reef and then onto the Twin Sisters. Palace Reef is along the side of a huge trench so it could be quite scary for those not used to diving where you can’t see the bottom. However, Brad and I stuck to the side of the reef looking for any interesting signs of life. Brad had been hoping to see a turtle and this was his lucky day! We came across two on this dive and you could see the excitement in his eyes. It was great to see him so happy.
Our next and final dive of the weekend was at the Twin Sisters. These are two wrecks that had been sunk specifically for divers. They are great to explore. I had a fantastic bimble around inside both of them. Brad saw a shark while I was looking around inside the first of the two wrecks. We looked everywhere on the wrecks. I was trying to find a nudibranch to take a photo of but I couldn’t see any 😦 Due to all the repetitive diving my NDL was running low so we started to head up to make our safety stop. While there Brad was messing around with his GoPro, I offered to take some video of him and at that moment a turtle came into view. Without a moments pause I shot after the turtle and filmed him swimming above the Twin Sisters. Here is a video of that turtle
All in all it was a fantastic weekend of diving. A total of 7 wrecks on Sunday out of 4 dives. Something that I would gladly repeat again.
Jump - Sail - Dive 